G Suite back online after long Google outage, and more tech news today

Your tech news digest, by way of the DGiT Daily tech newsletter, for Thursday, 20 August 2020.

1. Google finally restores service

Google had suffered major service disruptions overnight and into the morning, with G Suite problems affecting Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, Chat, and much more.

But, via its G Suite Status Dashboard, Google is now communicating that the service disruptions to Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Meet, and Google Voice are now over.

• Google Search, Maps, YouTube, and so on, all still worked at the time, but a host of people in many countries were affected.
• The no longer ongoing problem was best detailed from the status update on the Google Cloud incident page, which offered technical details:
• “We are experiencing an issue with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters using node auto-provisioning becoming stuck during node version upgrades. Node auto-upgrades have been disabled temporarily.”
• Which, yeah ok, doesn’t mean much to most people. Google usually does provide a detailed post-mortem report, which should be published to the G Suite page in time, following investigation.
• One more thing: weirdly, there was a major outage on August 19th last year, too. Coincidence, probably.

2. BlackBerry phones are coming back in 2021! For some reason! A new owner, and now packing 5G too. A dedicated keyboard may still work, but many of the problems BlackBerry phones solved are solved by all the other phones, too (Android Authority).

3. Samsung Galaxy A71 5G review: Affordable 5G that doesn’t feel cheap (Android Authority).

4. Budget camera phone shootout: Google Pixel 4a vs OnePlus Nord vs iPhone SE — which 2020 budget phone has the best camera? It’s easily the 4a. Easily! (Android Authority).

5. Zoom video calls come to smart displays from Google, Amazon, and Facebook: Soon, join a Zoom meeting just by using your voice with your Nest or Echo (Android Authority).

6. Instagram will show posts from strangers at the end of your feed, to, uh, keep you scrolling? (Android Authority).

7. Apple becomes first public company to reach a $2 trillion market cap. A nice joke tweet I saw: “If you had bought 100% of Apple’s stock in 1980, you’d have $2 trillion today.” (9to5Mac).

8. The next Call of Duty: Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War will be revealed on August 26: coming to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, and based on real-life events (Android Authority).

9. Lucid claims to have created the fastest charging EV to date: 20 miles per minute (Engadget).

10. Here’s how the cheapest electric car in the world holds up after three months (Jalopnik).

11. The giant JET (Joint European Torus) is trying to unlock unlimited clean energy via nuclear fusion (Wired).

12. Nagging sea level-rise mismatch solved: Improvements closed gap between estimated causes and measure change (Ars Technica).

13. Closest-ever (and thankfully tiny) asteroid to pass Earth and not hit us just squeaked by (CNET).

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